“I’m pretty sure I could still easily take you. So I wonder how power is calculated. Do I have stats too? But with your high rate of growth that seems rather useful. Especially if the final boss is who I suspect. I doubt a gun and some fire will be enough for him.” 

She points at Joons state of undress. “Okay nudist, you can keep talking games after we get some clothes. I don’t know how you can stand to be in public like that.”

Fel Seed? That's the first unbeatable final boss that comes to mind for him, the one he's most afraid will have made it to Aerb from his DMing. No, she wouldn't know anything about him. Thankfully.

"Don't remind me. Let's get back to our rooms."

Back in the room, Joon gets dressed and transcribes the relevant parts of his character sheet for the others. The short biographies are passed to their respective subjects privately, which earns another couple of insulting loyalty bumps. 

Amaryllis is the most direct descendant of Uther Penndraig, the Lost King, which gives her special claim-in-fact to a fair number of his estates and heirlooms bound along cognatic or enatic primogeniture, ultimogeniture, and gavelkind rules. She was once a keystone member of a bloc of power within the Lost King’s Court, but now she has been cast out through means both semi-legal and downright nefarious. Her homeland of Anglecynn is forbidden to her now, at least until she’s gathered enough power to wedge open some doors. 

Fenn is a half-elf born to an elven father and human mother. Her childhood was spent with alternating months in the Isle of Eversummer and the colony of Rogbottom. While her ears marked her as exotic and dangerous among the humans, her teeth marked her as a hideous disgrace among the elves. She has never felt at home in either world and pretends to understand less than she does in order to highlight her differences before anyone can call her on them. After she reached maturity she held several odd jobs until settling into a dangerous, solitary life entering into the Risen Lands exclusion zone to take whatever wasn’t nailed down. That life ended when she was arrested selling contraband to a fence. When Anglecynn needed a guide through Silmar City, she was pulled from prison and given a second chance. 

Tanya Degurechaff, of unknown parentage, was plucked from an Anglecynn orphanage to serve as a test subject for illegal research from an early age at a black site operated by the maverick scientist Schugel. After a catastrophic accident gave her severe burns across her body and unlocked her fire magic, she was healed and inducted into the Fuchsia Coterie as a child soldier. She was sent into the Risen Lands exclusion zone on one of her first combat missions when all her thoughts and memories of Aerb were suddenly erased, replaced with those of an alternate existence on a planet called 'Earth'. Now Tanya finds herself a newcomer to the world that has known her whole life.

"If you two will also get stronger to keep pace with me once your loyalty increases that far, that implies I should focus on the skillset that lets me best survive and grow, since you'll be able to cover speciality skills. Engineering and politics, scouting and archery, fire magic and warfare. I'm thinking I should spec into PHY and INS, that will give me the best caps for Dodge and Parry along with extra HP." He wants to parry bullets. 

Then he yawns. It's contagious.

“Schugel is here? In this world?” Tanya almost breaks the armrest of the chair she is in when he gives her her bio. She is clenching her fist that hard. “He needs to die. The Schugel I knew experimented with magics he should not have, he needs to die. He is a threat to everyone.” She remembers the magical nuke he made. The rockets. The orb.

Quest Accepted: He Needs to Die - Retrace Tanya's forgotten past to put an end to Schugel and his terrible experiments. (Companion Quest)

"My game layer agrees. It's on the quest list. No objections here."

Unsafe experiments burning a child alive is enough for Joon to consider the prospect of killing him, and the intensity of Tanya's reaction has him spooked.

"I've never heard of him before, which narrows it down to one of the labs I wasn't cleared for or a clandestine facility independently operated by one of the court. If what you say is correct of his version on Aerb, we should stop him before he mars Anglecynn with another exclusion zone."

“Do you know about nuclear weapons on earth? The Schugel I knew made a magical nuke. The man was insane, and a conduit for the manipulations of Being X.” The Orb was his creation. And she knows Being X was involved somehow. The man raved about getting inspiration from god.

"Nuclear weapons are excluded to Blue Fields. Once we have the resources from Caer Laga and perhaps the second most convenient cache depending on the entads we find, I suggest this quest should be our next priority."

Finding evidence of an opponent in the Court having sponsored exclusion-risking research with a photogenic victim like Tanya would also be an excellent political card to collect for her eventual return. Who might be ultimately responsible? Phlox? Onion? Too early to speculate and risk biasing her deductions. 

(If there was a tracker, Tanya’s loyalty to Amaryllis would have gone up several points. A reasonable superior, Tanya can barely believe it to be possible after the shitshow of imperial high command. Unfortunately only Joon gets a loyalty tracker.)

"If we're doing quests, I've got one for you too. I want us to go to the Isle of Eversummer and avenge my father."

Quest Accepted: Summer's End - Return to the place where Fenn received her scars and bring justice to the elves (Companion Quest)

"Got it." He'd meant to ask about the scars he saw in the baths, and now it sounds like he should wait for a more quiet moment for that.

"Last question for tonight. Joon, you predicted we might be pulled into vigilante activity here. Would the Risen Bile encounter qualify? What would you expect to follow?"

"If I was running the show? We've seen that they're killing people at random, that would be intended as hook enough for us to bring justice." borrowing the phrasing of Fenn's quest as it's in his field of vision. "But we've got a quest for Caer Laga and not for the Risen Bile - awful name - so instead it could be intended to set them up as a threat for later, if they escalate."

Fenn makes her feelings about discussion of narrative known. She flops on the bed and groans.

Then rolls over. 

"Hey, how are we doing the sleeping arrangements? I want to share with Mary or Tanya. No offense, Joon, but you still smell of blood. 

“I’m uhh… fine sharing I suppose.” She is an adult. She can totally handle the idea of sleeping next to someone. She’s slept next to Visha before But Visha was different. So why does it feel awkward to think about.

Tanya is small enough that it ends up being simplest for the three of them to share, leaving Joon with the room's folding camp bed.

Fenn is a cuddler in her sleep. 

It is an incredibly awkward night for Tanya. But she suffers through the cuddling with stoicism.

In the morning, when Amaryllis and Fenn have already left the room to go shopping for supplies, Tanya goes over to the still sleeping Joon and tips his cot over. “Wake up! We have a long day of training to get through!”

He lands on the floor with a crash. 

"Huh?"

Joon is not really a morning person.

“Get up! You lazy sack of shit! Everyone else has been up for hours! They’ve left for shopping so you what that means? Grinding time! I am going to train you within an inch of your life! So you don’t lose it permanently in combat! Get up!” You wouldn’t expect such a tiny girl to have a voice so shockingly loud. And she is already keeping it down for the neighbour's sakes.

Tanya slips into her role as a trainer of recruits. They need harsh love to have a chance to survive war. And the 203rd thrived under the harshest of training even when she was deliberately trying to make them give up and go home! So she had to be doing something right.

Okay, he can get behind that. 

"I'm up! What's on the montage for today? And can you keep it down a little?"

“Dodge!” She draws her knife and proceeds to swipe at him, giving him just enough time to dodge if he is paying attention. And nicking his skin if he isn’t. He has healing magic to train now after all.

It’s no making him dodge an artillery barrage, but she can’t train him properly in a hotel room.

"Ah! Again? I don't have bone magic yet!"